John Grisham is a firm believer in outlining.
“Outlines are crucial,” he told Slushpile.net. “I start with Chapter 1 and write a paragraph. Then Chapter 2, then Chapter 3. When I get to Chapter 40 the book had better be finished or I am in trouble. The outlining process is no fun, but it forces the writer to see the entire story.”
Without an outline, it could take him years and hundreds of wasted draft pages to finish the job–as happened with his first novel, A Time to Kill.
Bear in mind, Grisham writes a book a year, and has for 20 years. He can’t afford open ended literary road trips.
Not all of us are that systematically productive. Further, not all of us begin with the givens of a genre (“non-genre” mainstream novelists, for example, usually take more time because they start with a blank slate).
The novel is a broad canvas. Novelists, even mainstreamers, tend to log at least a bit of conceptual research – even if it’s on a cocktail napkin – before they plunge in. But outlines? I know writers who won’t hear of it: “Nope, sorry. The only way to create a resonant story is to write, write, write, and write some more. Outlines just lock you into a box you made before the fact. They’re premature.”
I’ve been on both sides of that fence. When I first started to write fiction, I was of the “no outline” school. There seemed to be something unnatural about outlining your story before it was written. Sticking to it was at best a chore, at worst intimidating. Worse than that, outlining smacked of “aiming low.” Didn’t real ideas bubble spontaneously out of the raw writing process. Weren’t real stories, the ones that mattered, created in a pure state of flow?
So to hell with outlines, then! My chosen M.O. would be to write raw draft, letting the words themselves seek and find the story. I wrote and wrote and wrote. If there was a method, it was simply to write forward, day by day – a seat-of-the-pants routine that produced some wonderfully spontaneous material but ultimately didn’t work for me.
Why not? Because it ran me up one blind ally after another, generating hundreds of pages of draft, but no story.
I was struggling and getting nowhere in a no-win situation: outline bad, writing for story bad.
I couldn’t talk to other writers about it because the discussion always became a debate – “to outline or not to outline.” For me this was not academic. It was intensely personal. It had consequences. My dream was on the line, and I realized if I didn’t come up with a method that worked for me, I might as well get out of fiction.
Tomorrow: seeking a flexible outline and finding it in The Three Rivers Method.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I usually have some sort of structure set up for a novel (short stories I sometimes wing, though I often have a few ideas in place before I start drafting). Not a detailed outline, but more of a roadmap. One I can toss aside as needed if I get headed down a cool, scenic side road. It helps knowing how the book ends, but you don’t have to be married to that ending, in my way of thinking.
As a genre writer as well as a “mainstream” writer I’m very interested in this statement: “Further, not all of us begin with the givens of a genre (”non-genre” mainstream novelists, for example, usually take more time because they start with a blank slate).” What givens are you talking about? Sure, a romance has a formula for a happy ending, and a mystery has a conclusion when the murder is solved, but… that’s still a pretty blank slate. Right? Just wonderin’.
Actually, Mike, I don’t think that’s still a pretty blank slate at all. Just to know, going in, there will be a murder puts you several squares down the board before you even begin. Crime novels, romances, etc. have to fulfill minimal genre expectations. If a reader buys a murder mystery with no murder or a romance with a horrific ending, that reader will feel gypped. These are givens. It’s possible to organize around them. By contrast, I once spent a couple of months debating with myself whether or not one of my major characters would kill another. It took so long because I had to decide if my story was more authentically itself with or without violence. I had no guideposts, no idea, when I started, what form it would take, whats sorts of thing would happen, even who the characters would be. I just began with a “what if…?” I like the metaphor of reinventing the wheel. That’s what I felt I was doing: creating my own mainstream sub-genre, if you will, and discovering its expectations as I went along, trying this, trying that, failing, trying again. If what you’re doing is building your own the genre, every new twist and turn in the process redefines it–and in turn has to be digested. It takes a lot of time to work that way
Okay, I get ya. I kinda thought that’s what you meant, but wanted a bit more. There are more challenges with genre fiction, of course — like creating a world in the future that makes sense, logically and economically and socially, etc., for SF — that you don’t have to deal w/ in mainstream fiction. But yeah, mystery and romance certainly have a built-in expectation. The trick, of course, is finding something fresh and orginal with the formula, something that’s never been done before.
Creating your own mainstream sub-genre… Hmmm… That sounds kinda cool. I like a challenge like that. Lemme get my notebook and jot down some ideas…